Country Boy
by Karanguni
Summary: It's good to find a place where you can feel alive. Zack, Tseng


He's a country boy from Gongaga. First time he saw Midgar was from the window of the Shinra recruitment train, the metal behemoth charging towards them at two hundred miles an hour: or was it them - the crazy bunch of young boys dreaming of becoming heroes - plunging forward to meet the Plate?

The hell if Zack knew, then and now. They all had their dreams, but 3rd class SOLDIER recruits fresh out of the Mako enhancement procedures really only wanted to do two things: master their new abilities, and make new friends. Nobody wanted to be a stranger - to themselves, or to the city.

It was an easy enough time getting to know everyone during military training: there weren't a lot of city boys, which surprised Zack at first, until he realised that Plate boys didn't like the idea of getting hot and sweaty, and Slum kids didn't like the thought of putting Shinra on their chests. Lots of his bunkmates came from all over the place: one or two from the Icicle Area, loads of people from Kalm. The northerners would wistfully talk about going boarding or skiing whenever they ended up doing the graveyard shift inside the stuffy, steaming hot reactors. Anyone from Kalm couldn't be trusted to keep an audience when they talked about chocobos: they'd just blabber on and _on_ about pedigree this and breeding that; but none of the others wanted to ride birds when you could ride motorcycle prototypes which could take your legs off if you weren't careful and go five times as fast as any feathered menace that'd sooner try to bite your fingers off.

But there was no one from Wutai; that was war country. Anyone with the wrong accent and funny brown eyes could start one hell of an incident. Every Security grunt and SOLDIER guy would have, at one point or another, lost friends to the seemingly unending violence over in the west. No one wanted to have anything to do with that bunch. It was safer, really, just not to mention them or the War or how long exactly it'd been since your best bud went off and never came back.

Which was a pity. One hell of a pity, because the moment you hit Sector Six you were practically _in_ Wutai: the streets were all lined with houses that had more red motifs on them than the average Sector One brownhouse; the shops had signs in a script you couldn't read; the guy passing you by had sharp, narrow eyes and spoke in a foreign language too fast for you to follow.

Midgar was migrant country: no one really ever _came_ from the city itself. When the place had been nothing but scrap metal and girders, they'd brought in tons of immigrants looking for jobs and a new life, and once the Plate had gone up and the generators gave light, the Wutai merchants had practically colonised all the goods distribution and import nodes in upper Midgar. The cheapest clothes and food and component units came from the Wutai shops, because it was those people who were thrifty enough and sly enough and acute enough to get it done on the cheap. They started small, and now they were practically a hidden empire of rich shopowners who dressed down because they saved more money that way.

Wutai had spirit, and Zack always admired that.

Once the military fatigues came off, the camaraderie of the bunk couldn't be counted on. Midgar encouraged a sort of reclusiveness, an outsider's xenophobia. At the end of the day, the city boys would go home whenever they weren't on duty, and the Kalm kids would stay on their end of the barracks while the guys from up North went off to do their own thing.

There was no one else from Gongaga: the place was too damned far away, too damned peaceful, too damned passive to breed real fighters. Gongaga was always a bit more spiritual than your average village: they were a simple people, but they were close, each and every villager, and they'd suffered sandstorm and heatstroke and hell together without ever once giving up. Zack'd visited a lot of his fellow SOLDIER's hometowns on missions, but they were all too green, too cold, too much like Midgar.

He missed home.

By the time Zack hit 2nd Class he knew every single SOLDIER on the 49th level, and could chat with them and hang with them and chill - but when the sun dipped below and turned cold tar into neon-washed blackness, he'd go out on his own, and search for a place in this bone-and-rock metal monster which still had _heart_.

Wutai had spirit.

Half the Plate loathed their foreign presence, Shinra detested the competition from their small businesses, the Slums were jealous of their built-from-scratch wealth: everywhere an Wutai man looked in Midgar, he'd find enemies, and yet on those of the sixth sector went with their lives: productive, silent, efficient, dogged. And when the lights came on in washes of white and green at night, the area around Reactor Number Six would come alive with the heavy beat and bass of a people who simply just _refused_ to die.

Zack always visited their clubs, and always went alone. The others wouldn't get it: they'd probably consider it vaguely traitorous to put foot on faux-enemy ground. But it was there, in the middle of what was derogatorily called "Little Wutai", that Zack tended to find himself. The clubs were packed and the lights were low and there was black hair and sharp jaws and strange language in the air. In one club, hundreds of these second generation offshoots would pack in body to body, and spend one night forgetting how far they were from a home they'd never seen, and relishing success in a city that didn't want them. They let Zack in and bore him no resentment; simply parting the sea of bodies to let him move and grind with the next man, or woman: it didn't matter. For a few hours every time he had a day off, Zack would find in the crazed loud music and the throng of the foreign crowd a little peace of mind, a little piece of home.

He never thought he'd see anyone from Shinra who'd understand. Nobody from Wutai, after all.

The first time he met Tseng in the briefing room, standing there cool, calm and dressed with a Shinra pin on his sharp black suit and no conflict in brown eyes even though the man _must_ have known what SOLDIER was doing in Wutai, _must_ have heard about the last mission Zack had detonating bombs in an Wutai outpost -- Zack had stared across the table at the Turk, and Lazard's words were silent in the background as he wondered, for the briefest of instants, if Tseng had ever been one of those bodies in one of those clubs on one of those nights; one of those people trying to feel alive. 


End file.
